... I can test if you could kill almost every plant without a penalty, screw with low hp 1st strikers, and even kill Bosses with complete physical and magical immunity. Oh and I needed that 5% extra, so deathgaze always trigers.

This was only my initial goal, the end result was much greater.

First off, my old strategy: for preps less glyphs for 5X150CP at least, a Yendor and transmutation scroll so I get double CP on my first glyph and that +45 gold is cool for buying a lot of stuff. I took an extra shop scroll for 1 more item or straight CP, any 4 potions and a good blacksmith item like bear mace. My god choice was Taurog for easy piety and possible 240 extra CP should I need it.This setup is really good if you want to play a somewhat interesting warmonger run too. You can grab Taurog's items in no time, glyh converts will make you swim in piety to use DPs as many times you need and deathgaze will cover warmongers' true weakness: high resist enemies. Even VT runs are managable. Usual dg% by the end is 85% without pactmaker and touching Taurog's gear.Just to mention knocback is mostly unneeded if you use cowardly well, but the 25% extra damage is nice.

But this is not what I wanted, I wanted a strat for every game and also become independent of Taurog's items for complete DG. I considered pactmaker's spirit pact from the beginning, but you cant prep pactmaker and due to my luck I nearly never encoutered him That's why I asked Lujo for advice on how to improve my strat, so I could remove possibly both Taurog and Pactmaker from the equation.

On some maps there are useful drops, HB is one of the best bc of the sensation stone and other charms. There I even reached 100% dg without Pm:

Not so long ago I had a better run, but still I'd classify it as bloopers. You can't imagine the numerous ways of epic fail on this

For fun I prefer Ick Swamp, but drops are less relyable. After tons of not gettin Pm runs, here's a success:

Turns out 100% dp is enough vs plants I was right with 1st strikers though.

And my biggest secret......remains a secret for 2 more weeks. It's so great that the devs will nerf/fix it when I post it here. However if anyone sends me a pm asking about it I'll share it. This is so anyone who wants to, can try it before it's removed.

Also thanks for everyone who posted on this topic, you all helped alot! In my upcomming post I will also tell it how.And any new idea you have still interests me, don't hold back

For closing here's an easter egg: an englightened gorgon on a purist run. And yes, I started worshipping him on lvl 1.

Wow thats some nice effort going into that gorgon. That should give quite a damage boost, but I'm not sure if it's worth all the effort as there are huge amounts of items getting converted. Though it is nice to see whats possible.

I did kind of jawdrop when I saw what the actual limits of the CP you can get are. I never really pushed it after the old CP trimming, but knowing all the sources might come in handy one day, especially if the game does get a DLC/expansion

Last edited by Lujo on Sun Feb 16, 2014 4:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Just popping in to say - Astral, this is a really awesome weird silly Gorgon strategy and I love the idea. No idea if I'll get time to try it out seriously for a couple of weeks. Edit: also, what did you do about the poison with Glowing Guardian - that always gets me whenever I see him as a Gorgon?

@Gakato:Thanks These screenshots don't show the optimal build, just the possibility. If you keep your +dmg and att% items you can have 75-85% dg with 100ish damage. Or even more if lucky.Sacrificing usefull stuff is only good if you know you'll reach 100% and combine it with the secret. But you already know that

@Lujo: Thank you too And you just reminded me that I forgot to mention the updated CP frenzy build. So instead of yendor prep Namtar's ward and transmute that for 5 more gold and some easy early game kills and one final DP for the end. And for those players who have a lot of veto slots, quest items is better than the shop scroll, just veto all low CP junk in advance.I didn't mention that if you try it on different maps, always go for the ones with multiple bosses, those +25 golds help a lot when you try to buy everything.

@Blovski: Thank you Ick Swamp is the perfect place for trying this. 2 of the monsters are undead: wraiths and vampires so you can meele them if you want to. There are a bunch of warlocks with low hp, if you only hit them when they are dying, they won't get poisened either. This is a situation where deathgaze really shines, you can 1st strike even higher lvl foes. Other than that I made sure most of my kill are burning kills, converted all my found potions, and poisend and manaburned myself before dings. The tricky part wasn't reaching Enlightenment, but surviving long enough to convert out.

Also it wasn't a serious run (at least at the beginning), I only came for experimenting and scouting stuff. That's why it was a purist run, so I lose nothing if I retry. To pass the time I was killing all the corrosive creepers and drank all the acid pools too. I didn't kill any enemy just wasted my blackspace and spammed endiswall to charge a bought fire heart - to see how the CP changes. When I found GG's altar I joined it - why not screw myself harder? When I discovered half of the map I found the balanced dagger, that made me try to kill foes and test how long I can get with GG. Surprisingly it worked out very well despite I had more corrosion than health till lvl 4 I wish I took a screenshot of my corrosion, but at that part I wasn't trying to win

I made a screenshot of the result screen, and combined with the previous pic (big lack of corrosive plants and acid pools) makes it somewhat believable.

Sorry if this post comes down as braggy, I'd just like to show how awesome gorgons are.

^ Yeah, I managed to nudge a GG Gorgon rather clumsily through Northern Desert to work out how you do it. The main thing is that the killing blow doesn't trigger the poison punishment even if it's not a death gaze (I didn't work out how this interacts with Knockback). Gorgons are awesome.